


War Story

by TheSpaceCoyote



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU setting, Blood, Character Death, Gen, Gore, M/M, Vietnam, Violence, warttime setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-11
Updated: 2012-02-11
Packaged: 2017-10-30 22:44:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSpaceCoyote/pseuds/TheSpaceCoyote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dirk Strider carried with him a fully-loaded M-60, one M-18 smoke grenade, a blunted machete, dental floss, and stale M&Ms as well as signal flares and detonators and wiring and a mosquito net full of holes and condoms and dust and sunglasses and a pair of headphones with the paint scratched off into initials. </p><p>And Jake English, though he didn't and never will realize it, carried Dirk Strider.</p>
            </blockquote>





	War Story

**Author's Note:**

> A brief disclaimer--this isn't just shippy stuff going down in a setting that happens to be the Vietnam War. A couple of weeks ago I read "The Things They Carried" and it....to say the least, really moved me. It had been awhile since I'd read a book whose style and tone grasped me so much, so I wanted to make a tribute to it. So, though this fic contains one-sided DirkJake, I also meant to explore the themes and narrative style of the novel rather than make it a solely shippy venture. Uhm, yeah.

 

 

Some nights you are convinced that Vietnam talks. 

You don't know where it began, really, when every rustle in the trees and caw in the night became a chorus or an orchestra of reedy flutes playing out your anxiety for the VC to hear. On nights when you're awake and Vietnam speaks, when it whispers in your ear and tells you to look behind you and makes you tighten your hair-trigger senses while you sit in a muddy red foxhole on the bank of Song Tra Bong the only salvation you have is the taunt breathing and humored, clipped accent of one Jake English. 

Jake, and his talk of movies and things that are so _casual_ they seem almost ridiculous grounds you whenever the symphony of Vietnam swells to an unbearable crescendo.    

It eventually comes to a point where you wonder whether you've fallen in love with Jake or not.  

After a couple days' musings though, you realize it's probably not really love. It's probably just a reminder of normalcy, the way Jake treats this all like an excursion, like an adventure. It's the way all nineteen-year-old boys _should_ react, it's the way it would be without the reminder of the war around.  

Jake is attractive enough--you think he could probably land a gig in one of those movies he always drones about, what with all that tanned skin and messy hair and great soulful green-gray eyes.  

It's not true love. It's not romance. You don't wax eloquent to him at nights when the mosquitos bite at your face and the pervading jungle carries a weight of inevitable doom. You don't put your coat down for him when you all have to trudge through a field with mud up to your thighs.  

But Jake is the last shred of normalcy for thousands of miles around, and damn it if you don't want to protect and preserve that for as long as possible. Damn it if you don't clean the shit out of his eyes, damn it if you don't listen to his prattling about stories of adventure and heroics. You briefly think that in some way, maybe this is Jake's defense mechanism at play, and maybe deep deep down there's a terrified child that would scream and pull out their hair and torch the entire damn jungle down if it meant a chance to go back home. You don't think that for long.   

Today you sling your load--M-60, 23 pounds, one M-18 smoke grenade, 24 ounces --down on the ground on the edge of a clearing as Vantas calls your march to a brief halt. Zahhak sits next to you, the fucker, shuffling the fucked-up fetish mag clippings he carried around-- _German_ , he had told you--and normally you would take an interest, but today you don't and instead you look around.  

Makara lean against a tree a ways away, and you briefly make contact with his doped up stare. He's been hitting the tranquilizers ever since his buddy got his legs blown off and died in a helicopter over Chu Lai. He's too calm. It freaks you out even more than the flitting illusionary VC shadows you think you see at night.  

Captor is bent down with Vantas a couple of feet away, long grass up to their elbows as they crouch. You can see the slim red glint of the prescription goggles slung about his throat--a memento of home and a good luck charm that's served him pretty well so far. Vantas carries nothing around his neck but guilt and anger.  

Your eyes fall on Jake at the very moment he breaks the general silence of the clearing, and your heart squeezes a bit as the boy bounds up to his feet, all charisma and charm despite his snot green fatigues. He rolls his sleeves up to his elbows and jostles Ampora into playing a round of toss the smoke grenade, laughing boisterously as the man shirks from the tanned arm thrown about his shoulders.   

You watch Jake play his silly little game, flitting in and out of the shade and light as he moves and hop-skips, and again you wonder about love.  

Love doesn't work out here, you know that. Love doesn't play out the same way here as it does a million miles away back in the states. Love doesn't have the same rules when clouded by mist and bog and jungle, with its nostrils full of fear.  

Love doesn't fucking sit around and twiddle its own asshole here because one moment Jake is smiling, beautiful buck-teeth glinting in the sun and then--what? 

Then Jake is gone, then Jake is blown up sky high and scattered in the tree.  

You don't scream. You don't, fuck you don't ever react at all, what the _fuck_ is wrong with you are you that far fucking gone that even the damn pace of your breath doesn't change when your best friend gets fragged to holy hell.  

You suppose you rise to your feet at some point because Zahhak disappears from your sight, your eyes trained up, up above the puff of dirtied smoke rising above the ground to find the new decorations hanging from the tree's canopy.  

In one way, you find it kind of beautiful, and it almost fits, a beautiful death for a beautiful chump. The way his body seemed to levitate for the moment, basked and silhouetted in the light that falls from the canopy of trees before it sucked him up into the branches to float like a disemboweled dove.  

And in a different way, it's like the others. It's happenstance. One moment a guy is hanging about, taking a piss or playing ball or smiling and the next instant his guts have been turned into a fucking garland.

Bam. One moment Jake is treating it like he always treats it, like a fucking nature hike, and the next he emerges from the shade and his beautiful buck teeth glint in the sun and his foot nudges a bouncin' Betty and he's flying up into the trees. 

You go up with Makara once Vantas orders you to take him down. The illness festers in your stomach as you scale the limbs. The rough whitened vines bite at your hands as you claw your way up, convincing yourself that the raw wetness on your hands is nothing but morning dew. 

Makara gets there first, chuckling as he untangles a glistening brown mess that once belonged somewhere inside Jake and tosses it down. His snaggleteeth show, you can see them out of the corner of your eye. 

"Just like that," he gurgles, shaking his head, "Just like that. Fuckin' _boom._ "

Jake smiles at you in the sunlight as you tear a piece of him away from the branches and throw it to the dogs below. 

There's a tooth stuck in your hair. Fuck. You shake it out. 

Once you scrape enough of Jake out to warrant a visit to the LZ you and Makara climb down out of the tree. The stretcher to the side of you is soaked red and brown. 

You don't look.

You shouldn't look.

You do look.

Somehow it's worse that Captor has tried to arrange the parts into a vague Jake-like shape, because _fuck_ that makes it all the more real. Jake's eyes are still gray-green and open, and he still has most of his arms and chest and _shit_ somehow he's still fucking beautiful even with his guts blown open and soaking through the stretcher--

You close your eyes. 

By the time you get home in four months as a result of a thick shard of shrapnel in the leg, your mind has filled in the blanks with histrionics and embellishments and symbolism in order to justify to yourself that your experience meant something. You are no longer able to separate reality and fiction, and you begin to swear that when Jake smiled and you and laughed at your jokes there was genuine love in his eyes.   You begin to believe that when you brought Jake down from the tree that he was whole, that his teeth were arranged in a grin and----

 

\---In a fit of last ditch, righteous passion---

 

\---You planted your lips onto his mangled ones---

 

\---And kissed him.


End file.
